Faces of China

Our Chinese home exchangers, Laura and Iris

Poor, poor Dr. Li, left holding the bag. He, you may recall, is the father of Laura, one of the charming Chinese girls who spent two weeks in our Paris apartment, only to remove their own home exchange listing, with its photos of a colorful, sweet apartment, from the home exchange web site. So we arrived in Shanghai to something quite other than what they had promised.

A neighborhood worker

To recapitulate: The place had been vacant for 5-6 years. Empty and sooty and dirty, it was a kind of tenement which maybe 5 or 6 years ago in China would have seemed normal.  We were blessed with a hot plate and a microwave from the previous century, a shower spigot sticking out of the bathroom wall, so you had to use the filthy mop that was available to dry the bathroom floor when you took a shower.  The air breathed of soot. There were some old dusty shelves, no furniture really, window screens clogged with grime.  The washing machine was ancient and its settings were all in Chinese characters. The kitchen shelves were so filthy we used take-out cardboard to eat from. 

Wu Garden

Dr. Li had been there to welcome us to our abysmal home away from home, and subsequently spent days trying to compensate for what he didn't quite seem to understand about the situation. He repeatedly tried to get us an internet connection, even offering to lend us a computer (he's a professor on campus and connected to the internet). He lent us a cell phone for local calls. And he told us that Laura wanted him to prepare dinner for us, since we had taken the girls out for a last dinner in Paris.

Dr. Li is a short man, trying, pressing his efforts on you, his neck bulging as he tries to make you understand. His English is extremely limited. His wife is always there, an ephemeral presence - she seems to have a kind of wasting disease, and smiles distantly with her tiny rosebud mouth and strained pale face. He is pushing, pushing her into place, patting her on the back, reassuring her, including her, and she stands there, helpless. Trying to make everything work with this distant and weak companion, he is practically roaring with effort.

Tourists in Hangzhou

He informed us that he would pick us up for dinner at 5pm on a Sunday, and we were ready. The neighbors seemed to be admiring us, his classy guests, and he spoke excitedly with them. He had told me that he lived 7 minutes away, but that Sunday he told us the drive was 40 minutes. He began the drive saying, "My English is very poor"-- and the rest was silence. We had told him I was a vegetarian, and so when we arrived at a distant suburb in a Swiss-style complex with cute little wooden driveways, all very densely packed nonetheless, he carried vegetables out of the car.

Nanjing Road

His car was immaculate - it was as if his life had not absorbed the many things that we Westerners have-- and so was the apartment, with ultraviolet lights illuminating a neo-Chinoiserie style ceiling. He put us on the sofa in a spare living room and turned on the large flat-screen TV, while he and Madame closed the glass sliding door of the kitchen and chopped vegetables for half an hour. And then we sat before many bowls of coldish food. They gave us the two plates, and kept for themselves tiny bowls. Chinese-style, we picked at the multitude of dishes in front of us with our chopsticks. Madame took a tiny cocktail tomato at a time, chewing slowly. Dr. Li would sit and watch us, momentarily paralyzed, and then roar into action, grabbing food and chewing with gusto, popping into the kitchen as he had another idea, taking thick dumplings out of the freezer and putting them in the microwave. Madame would pause, her eyes inward, concentrating on his absence, until he returned. We smiled and munched till we couldn't eat more. Madame took the smallest bites of cucumber, her impenetrable face focused on something inside and, without turning toward him, on every movement of her active husband. He kept pushing, pushing everything into place while she abstracted quizzically, chopsticks in hand.

Knitting in Nanshi, "Chinatown"

When we declared ourselves full he smiled broadly, a huge burden lifted. He joined us before the TV, kicked back on the couch and grinned like a kid. We showed him the pages of our French guidebook, which had both French and Chinese titles for all that we had visited. He pounded the pages and shook his head hard, yes, yes, that's what we have in Shanghai. Half the time he laughed out loud saying YOU visited THAT? (This applied to the Museum of the First Communist Congress, the home of Soong Qing Ling, and anything of recent history.)

Our duties to each other had been discharged, leaving us with more questions than answers. Who are these Chinese before whom the whole world is beginning to quake?

Fellow tourists in Hangzhou

It was while we were in Shanghai that a tragic incident took place which quickly became an international internet conversation.  A toddler, daughter of rural immigrants, was hit by 2 different hit-and-run vehicles and left bleeding in the street. Finally an elderly woman picked her up. One driver had stopped briefly, calculated his risk, and driven on. One driver had said to the press: It would be better if she dies, it would cost him less. She died shortly afterward. 

The conversation that swarmed the internet grappled with: "what kind of people are we"?  It has been picked up by the Western press as well. On the Care2 blog it is linked to a conversation about Chinese students in America. According to a study, 90% of them misrepresent or forge their credentials to get into American universities. Most of them plagiarize to get through. (As a former college professor, I can say that many, many students plagiarize to get through, immigrants or no.)

Food vendor in Nanshi

At any rate there is quite a discussion going on about the products of the single child policy in China. The Canadians with whom we exchanged in Beijing had just had their beloved golden retriever killed by some kids just trying to see how fast they could drive their new BMW. 

The same week as the toddler was hit, a  woman tried to drown herself at Hangzhou, in the beautiful lake we would visit a few days later. An American woman jumped in the lake and saved her, then vanished without waiting to receive any recognition.  These two news items were being linked in the internet discussions among the Chinese and around the world.

Passerby in Nanshi

Our experience of personal relationships was that we were anonymous and not anyone's problem until we were really face to face, and then individuals could be wonderful. Or, in the case of Beijing, predatory. But once you are eating at the same table, or sitting in the same taxi, there is a stirring of kindness, of a shared responsibility. 

For example, nobody gets up to offer their seat on the metro, nobody.  But once we were rushing into the metro. I was very upset--I didn't even realize how upset I was. An older middle aged woman said to me, you sit, you sit, and gave me her seat.  And then, to my own surprise, I burst into tears!  Another time an older middle aged woman saw that Jacques and I were sitting very far apart on the metro (we were the only Caucasians in sight). She started yelling for Jacques to take her seat and sit next to me, and then she stood for another three stops!  So it's as if there are two psychic distances, very distant and very intimate.

in Pudong

Every day now the New York Times runs an article on life in China. We can see other close-ups of the faces of China in the work of Chinese writers, and in Peter Hessler's wonderful Oracle Bones, which explores the lives of his former students and the news reporting he's done in China. There is no simple answer. The Chinese people have strong personalities. They are charismatic, pragmatic, and very present. It is hard to imagine them swooning with allegiance to Chairman Mao.

It's simply as if there is a profound incoherence in the society, as  this country hurtles, with its infinite number of individual lives, into the future.